Toward the end of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, he constructed his second and last skyscraper, the 19-story H. C. Price Company Office Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. After the skyscraper was completed, Wright appeared with his client at a convocation in town. “A person in the audience asked the question, ‘What’s your first prerequisite?’” Mr. Wright said, ‘Well, to fulfill a client’s wishes.’ To which Price (the client) said, ‘I wanted a three-story building.’ Mr. Wright said, ‘You didn’t know what you wanted.’”

I love this story because it brings up something that I have battled with during several projects.

A client will often ‘know’ what they want, without really having a true grasp of the entire situation.  The requirement can be to supply the biggest network connection possible, and sometimes this gives the client a bill that they just can not afford. Or the requirement can be to increase the saturated network by 10%, to relieve saturation. The client may not know that two months after the project is complete that their network will be saturated again.

I’ve actually had both requirements given for projects in one company.

Setting up the biggest network connection possible would have been 155-Mbps ATM connection for the country in question. But the national carrier did not have the 155-Mbps available from that country to our destination. We ended up using a 4-Mbps connection. This far exceeded the client needs, and the network actually delivered the full 4-Mbps to the destination.

In a second country, the 10% increase to relieve saturation would have done nothing more than lighten the load. I explained to the client that they needed a network big enough that, at the end of the fiscal year, it was only at a maximum of 85% saturated. The client was not happy because of the additional cost that the office would have for an ‘empty’ network, but once in place the users in the office had a noticeable increase in productivity.

The moral of the story, don’t assume that the client knows what he really wants.